Healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente announced this week to outsource the jobs of 60 gardeners at its facilities across Northern California, including in Vallejo.

Kaiser officials say what they’re considering will have no impact on workers in their Northern California facilities.

“This announcement is just the latest example of how much Kaiser Permanente has drifted from its slogan of helping the community ‘thrive,’ because when it comes down to it, profits are the only thing that seem to matter to them,” said Asa Bowman, a gardener at Kaiser Permanente in Walnut Creek, who may lose her job. “If Kaiser truly cared about doing right by the community, it would protect good paying jobs with benefits — especially since Kaiser’s profits are skyrocketing.”

In a Sept. 17 letter to SEIU-United Healthcare Workers’ West, the gardeners’ union, Kaiser Permanente said it “is considering transitioning our in-house landscaping operations to an external vendor that provides a comprehensive program for campus landscaping maintenance and management.”

Under the plan, the gardeners would lose their jobs and an outside company would hire replacement workers who are paid less and receive fewer benefits than current employees, union officials said.

The proposal comes despite Kaiser Permanente reporting reserves of $29 billion and profits being up 22 percent from 2016 to 2017, union officials said. Kaiser is registered with the Internal Revenue Service as a non-profit organization, meaning it does not pay income taxes on its earnings or property taxes on its buildings.

John Nelson, Kaiser Permanente vice president of communications, said Kaiser “effectively uses an outside landscaping firm at six of our Northern California medical centers to provide a comprehensive campus management program and a level of expertise. We are considering the decision to have our remaining Northern California campuses managed by an outside vendor. We have notified the union and asked to meet to discuss the potential decision. We are committed to working with our employees and the union in accordance with the terms of our collective bargaining agreement.”

Kaiser Permanente is growing and adding jobs overall, he said.

“As one of the largest private employers in California with more than 149,000 employees and 16,000 physicians, we have added more than 13,000 jobs in the state since 2015,” Nelson said. “We have more than 12,000 open staff positions and will continue to add many kinds of jobs, including blue collar jobs. The number of our employees represented by SEIU-UHW has grown by more than 8,000 over the same period.”

Nelson said Kaiser officials are “disappointed that the current leadership of SEIU-UHW has chosen to mischaracterize Kaiser Permanente’s strong commitment to labor and to pursue an adversarial, destructive approach to its relationships with several California health care systems. In fact, SEIU-UHW’s approach stands in stark contrast to the productive, progressive relationships we have maintained with many other unions representing our employees.”

He said Kaiser officials “never take decisions that affect our employees lightly.”

“We don’t know of any other employer who offers more generous support to employees who are affected by job changes: We try to retrain and reassign our people first, and if that isn’t feasible, we provide them up to one year of salary and benefits,” he said.

More than 55,000 Kaiser Permanente employees in California are members of SEIU-UHW. They along with 30,000 other Kaiser employees nationwide comprise the Coalition of Kaiser Unions, whose national agreement with Kaiser expires Sept. 30, 2018, union officials said.

With the Times-Herald since 1999, Rachel Raskin-Zrihen has been a reporter, writer and columnist for several print and online publications for nearly 30 years. She is the married mother of two grown sons and lives locally.